[NYAPRS Enews] GNS: NYS MH Advocates Urge Sex Offender Pgm Reconfiguration

[Matt Canuteson]

NYAPRS Note: Representatives from the broad array of statewide advocacy
groups for mental health services to adults, teens and children met
yesterday to examine common themes and efforts prior to the upcoming
state budget session in NY. Among the group's shared concerns were the
rising drain of the state's sex offender civil commitment program on
state mental health dollars, a trend highlighted in the following
article in today's Journal News.

That program, authorized by New York's 2007 Sexual Offender Management
and Treatment Act, allows "the State to continue managing sex offenders
upon the expiration of their criminal sentences, either by civilly
confining (in state psychiatric centers) the most dangerous recidivistic
sex offenders, or by permitting strict and intensive parole supervision
of offenders who pose a lesser risk of harm." 

Alarmed by the extraordinary rise in the program's cost of an additional
$50 million each year (as more offenders are sentenced to state
psychiatric centers), advocates are urging that the state look at
alternative settings and levels of treatment and supervision that we
believe will be equally secure, more economical overall and less
threatening to increasingly vulnerable state mental health dollars.

  

Advocates: Imprison Sex Offenders; Keep Psychiatric Services
Cara Matthews  Gannett News Service  November 25, 2008

ALBANY - Mental-health advocates are asking that officials look first at
trimming the state's expensive sex-offender treatment program to help
during New York's fiscal crisis rather than reducing services for people
with mental illness.

State law provides that sex offenders who have completed their prison or
parole terms but are considered too dangerous to live in society be
placed in psychiatric institutions and receive treatment. Advocates for
people with psychiatric disabilities have argued that the sex offenders
should be housed in prisons or with intensive supervision in the
community.

"We've always maintained that it was bad public policy, that it was
costly and that it was an inappropriate setting," said Glenn Liebman,
CEO of the Mental Health Association of New York State.

Now, as the state's financial problems become more acute and additional
cuts for mental-health care more likely, groups like the Mental Health
Association want the governor and lawmakers to take a second look at how
much is spent on sex offenders. There are fewer than 200 sex offenders
housed in psychiatric hospitals as part of the state's
$50-million-a-year sex-offender program when people whose cases are
still being adjudicated are subtracted, Liebman said. That means the
real cost is about $400,000 per person, with a large price tag for
treatment and security staff, he said.

"If they were in a correctional setting, absolutely you wouldn't need
such staffing," Liebman said.

He noted that the need for mental-health services goes up when the
economy is poor.

The sex-offender program costs $48 million a year, and the annual cost
per bed is $225,000, said Jeffrey Gordon, a spokesman for Gov. David
Paterson's Division of Budget.

The Budget Division will look at the recommendation, Gordon said. The
governor is scheduled to present his 2009-10 budget proposal Dec. 16,
and the administration is not commenting or speculating on what it will
include, Gordon said.

"Of course we're going to be looking at the cost of reducing the program
along with every other program the state administers," he said.

The number of sex offenders in mental-health facilities was 177 as of
Nov. 13, with many of those in the middle of the civil commitment
process, said Jill Daniels, a state Office of Mental Health spokeswoman.
Of the 177, 122 were in Central New York Psychiatric Center in Marcy,
Oneida County, and 44 were in St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center in
Ogdensburg, St. Lawrence County. The rest were at Manhattan Psychiatric
Center, she said. Most trials are in New York City, so some stay at
Manhattan Psychiatric during those times.

State spending to treat sex offenders will only grow over time since
many people placed in civil confinement are there for the long term,
said Harvey Rosenthal, head of the New York Association of Psychiatric
Rehabilitation Services. It would cost the same amount of money to build
a new psychiatric center every few years, he said.

"We understand that this is a time when we're looking to make economies,
and accordingly we think reconfiguring how we house and treat the
sex-offender group would be a way to make economies that both protects
the public but doesn't unravel the mental-health system," he said.

When the state passed civil-confinement legislation for sex offenders in
2007, there was an agreement that paying for it would not take money
away from mental-health services, Rosenthal said. Advocates believe that
has started happening "and is on schedule to do that at an alarming
rate," he said.

A number of sex offenders in the mental-health system predate the
state's civil-confinement law. New York began civil commitment for sex
offenders three years ago under then-Gov. George Pataki. The state's
highest court found that the Pataki administration had improperly used
mental-hygiene law to confine the offenders after the end of their
prison terms.

Sex offenders likely don't need hospital-level care in many instances,
Rosenthal said, but an intensive "community incarceration" kind of
program with mandated supervision, anklets and other conditions. That
kind of treatment would be cheaper and would prevent the loss of
mental-health funds for people with psychiatric disabilities, he said.

Services for children and adults that are known collectively as a
mental-health safety net received two rounds of cuts this year. One was
2 percent, which was included in the budget lawmakers passed in April.
The second, in the summer, was a 6 percent across-the-board reduction to
areas like day centers, case management, peer-support and other programs
that are critical to helping people stay safe and in treatment and out
of hospitals, prisons and homeless centers, Rosenthal said. The combined
financial impact was an estimated $40 million to $50 million, he said.

http://lohud.com/article/2008811250354 

 

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